Someone to Drive You Home

Rough Trade; 2006

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Like candles in the goddamn wind, man. The long, blonde leading ladies of classic film were larger than life, and every one a muse: "She's a femme fatale," Nico sang with the Velvet Underground, supposedly in reference to fellow Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. "She looks like Eve Marie-Saint in 'On the Waterfront'," swooned Lloyd Cole on his 1984 hit "Rattlesnakes". Even Billy Bragg had Woody Guthrie's "Ingrid Bergman" on Mermaid Avenue.

A quintet of two guys and three dolls, the Long Blondes seem obsessed with cinema-- Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Arlene Dahl, From Here to Eternity, and C.C. Baxter: All they want is "a good film noir and a bottle of gin." If those starlets of the silver screen can be blamed for our culture's impossible standards regarding the opposite sex, clearly it's all that hardcore, girl-next-door interporn that offers enough "reality" for guys to hold down jobs, tie our shoes, and buy Valentine's Day presents. Sheffield's the Long Blondes say: You could have both!!!

Produced by Pulp's Steve Mackey (singles re-recorded, sadly), the Long Blondes inherit that band's arched back and sharp tongue, plus a bit of Elastica's love of borrowed late-70s riffs. So they're the pop-punk Dusty Springfield to fellow Sheffield band the Arctic Monkeys' provincial kids-today Kinks. But what the album really tells us most about is the divide between the girls on film and our little iWorld-- the contrasts between romantic notions and dreary humdrum, wants and needs, love and being in love, and inertia and bone-jumping. It makes you wonder why anyone actually likes the Kooks.

"I know all about fear and desire," Jackson asserts on brazen opener "Lust in the Movies", sounding like she lives on lipgloss, cigarettes, and glasses of wine. And she does know fear, of a sort: She's often measuring herself against idealized competition, as on "In the Company of Women" ("What's she got that I might not?"), or waiting out the other girl rather than risk loneliness (on "Only Lovers Left Alive"). She talks a lot in the imperative ("Don't turn around, don't walk away," or "Don't go to London"), and, on "Heaven Help the New Girl", she updates the classic trembly girl-group ballad better than anybody (apart from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell), with an arrangement equally suitable for Morrissey or Colin Meloy.

Jackson's got desire down, as well: "There are wants and there are needs/ And they're two very different things/ You can love or be in love," she sets forth in "Weekend Without Makeup". On upbeat twentysomething tragedy "Swallow Tattoo", she's distressed by the significance of a common prison tattoo, but still wants to... you know. And on the extra-catchy single "Once and Never Again", she knows how it feels to be 19 -- and she'd "love to feel a girl [that] age."

As Pulp's Jarvis Cocker quipped on his band's breakthrough album, His 'n' Hers: "Imagine it's a film and you're the star.../ You might get your happy ending/ Your ending, the thing you deserve." Most so-called "cinematic" records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. Instead, it's the songs themselves, their narratives, and their characters that speak to the band's widescreen ambitions. None achieves this with more success than "You Could Have Both", the Long Blondes' most expansive moment, as a blistering circa-1993 proto-Britpop guitar charges into yet another love triangle that doesn't make any difference to Jackson. "I don't kid myself about happy endings," she insists, speaking at last like a true femme fatale.